I went to college at this tiny photography and graphic design school right outside of Philadelphia, in the Germantown area. It was a two year college where I received my associates degree in photography. I was accepted to the University of Delaware and West Chester as well, but I always knew I wanted to be some type of artist and photography was my thing.
Aside from the actual getting up and going to class part, we did some dumb shit during those years. The students lived in off-campus apartments amongst normal, law-abiding citizens, which wasn't always smooth sailing. My roommates and I made it work for the most part.
My first year I lived with Jess, who I met while still in high school because our dads worked together. We shared an apartment with Heidi, who was easy to get along with until the end of our second semester. Jess's boyfriend Jim stayed at the apartment often, but it didn't bother me even though her and I shared a bedroom. I think it was also because we were three 18-year-old girls living by ourselves in Germantown as well.
Art school is very different from "real college." A lot of interesting characters. Our apartment became Grand Central Station because we had the best pot. And tons of booze. I smoked enough pot that year to last me a lifetime. The first time we got Heidi to smoke with us she ended up with food poisoning, of course from the dinner I had cooked. You can imagine our horror at having to drive her to the emergency room while the three of us were high as a kite. We didn't know if she was having some sort of reaction to the pot, or the feta cheese chicken. She was throwing up everywhere and I remember making her hold a plastic grocery bag while she sat in the passenger seat of my car on the way to the hospital. Turns out it was just an allergic reaction to feta, she was sick for about another day, but made a full recovery. She decided to stick with booze after that little episode.
We partied so much and did so many things that were just...wrong. And we have a lot of it on film (yes, it was back when we developed and printed our work the old-school way.) Just about every apartment had it's own Wall of Shame. And if you were on it, you had to autograph the photo.
My first semester I also met Tristan. Oh, Tristan. He was sexy. Typical douchebag, but definitely sexy. Tall, dirty blond hair, bedroom eyes, amazing drummer. He was also the male slut of the school. (Come to find out it was an act, people just assumed he was. He recently told me that a lot of girls just gave him head, and he only slept with a select few.) We were formally introduced at a 311 show. I coordinated the outing for a big group of us, because by the second week of school, everyone knew how obsessed I was with 311. Tristan's roommate, Anthony, convinced him to go because Chad Sexton is one of the best drummers around. To this day, if asked, he will credit me for getting him into 311. After that concert we were inseparable, for the most part. The first time we had sex was a disaster though. It was after an impromptu party at my apartment. We were shitfaced, half-passed out in the hallway, because every available space was taken, even my own bed. We ended up fucking in the bathroom, me up on the sink and him standing in front of me. And because he was so tall, and I'm relatively short, it was quite difficult. It didn't last very long, and he shot a load all over my favorite pair of pants which were lying on the floor. I think we even succeeded in waking up my roommate and her boyfriend who were asleep in the next room.
The Black and White darkroom at school could be a very happenin' place. There was a CD player in there, and everyone always had to battle this one weirdo who insisted on playing Enya when the rest of us wanted to listen to Veruca Salt, Pink Floyd, Phish, Rusted Root, etc. I miss being able to create my art with my own hands the way I could with the developer, fixer, and wash. It was easy to spend hours working on one single print.
My second year was devoted to all color printing, but I couldn't give up black and white film, so the majority of my work was shot with black and white film and printed on color paper. The tones I was able to achieve were so much more appealing to me than just shooting and printing in color.
To just list some of the non school-related shit we did - blunt rides up and down Kelly Drive. Trips to the local diner to see how much we could freak out the waitress. Nights when those of us who lived in the same apartment building would all have dinner together. Lasagna Night. Shrimp Night. Margarita Night. Potluck Night. Getting high and going over to Tristan's only to have him call me out because all I could do was giggle at him. Hanging out with Bucket and Ryan, two of Jersey's finest.
Having people over to the apartment, only to get them fucked up and see how much it took to make them puke. Not intentionally of course, because it was always disgustingly messy. Our credo was, "The first night you stay at Jess & Dana's, you're gonna barf." And for some reason we took pride in that. I brought up some God-awful concoction my uncle came up with and our hippie friend Lindsey drank it all, only to be viciously sick and blame me for it, after I had warned her. My uncle LOVED that story.
Fuck, even those that could hang chose our place to be the one they got sick at. My own girls who came to visit me - Jenny, Lisa, Samantha, Jaime. One night Jenny thought she was dying. I laid in bed reading while she sat in the middle of the bedroom floor with her head hung over the trash can. I told her I wasn't taking her to the ER, so she had better puke. She really thought she was dying. "Just wait for it, hon, just wait for it. You'll feel so much better." And once she puked, she was fine. I knew what I was doing.
Wow, we were fucking stupid. But really we were just kids out on our own for the first time, trying to discover who we were, what made us tick, and our niche in the photography or graphic design arts. We had this one teacher for large format photograhy, Vlad, who everyone HATED in the beginning. We hated him because he made us strive for perfection. By the end of spring semester, our hate morphed into love for the instructor who would look at our work, tell us it sucked, and make us go back and do it all over again. It was a piece I did for his class that won in the Student Choice category in the school's annual photgraphy competition. When it was unveiled, Vlad was standing next to me and I turned to him and said (more like yelled) "Would you LOOK at that? That's MINE!" And then I stuck my tongue out at him. He just shook his head and laughed, which was his way of giving approval.
My second year at school I was much more subdued. I was going home every weekend because I just felt the need to be there. My parents were going through a very difficult time in their marriage, my mother was having major complications from knee surgery, and I was at a point in my friendship/relationship with my Ex where I was completely devastated. A lot of tears were shed that year, and it was very difficult to balance school and my personal issues. When it came time to start putting together my final portfolio, I was at a loss. My original idea was to do a series of portrait based on song lyrics, because I wanted to incorporate my love of music into my art. It didn't quite work out that way. After sitting down with my advisor, we determined that the best way for me to try and deal with my emotional turmoil was to capture it on film. All year I had been observing friends, family, and my home life through the lense of my camera anyway, so after sifting through my mountains of film and contact sheets (which are basically 8x10 sized index prints) I was able to give birth to my portfolio, and it was cathartic.
I may not have been the best photographer to receive my degree, but I was proud of myself. And I learned so many valuable lessons that I might have missed had I attended a tradtional four-year university. So I settled for experiencing "that kind of college life" through friends that went to the big schools. I've slept on the tiled floors of dorm rooms, showered in communal bathrooms where I had to wear flip flops, broke my toe while drunk on Bacardi 151 and left a trail of blood up three flights of stairs, went to various sporting events, etc. But on my own I learned not to be alone in a room with a guy who's consumed almost an entire bottle of vodka. (I owed Jess, Ryan and Bucket my life for helping to get me out of that situation.) How to handle my alternator crapping out on me right in the middle of the intersection of Broad and South Streets, to stay away from apartments whose tenants have an arrest warrant out for them, and to trust myself and only myself (with the exception of Jess and Lindsey) when shit hit the fan.
Oh, college. It was beautiful, it was dirty, it was rich.
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